Ride The Hill: A Bike Friendly University
Dear Administration,
I am writing you this letter to inform you of a movement that your students, staff, and faculty have begun. It is a movement whose common goal is to work together to provide a safer, more accessible campus. This movement is called “Ride The Hill”. Its purpose is to illustrate to you that there is a problem and that it can be fixed.
“Ride The Hill” is the brainchild of a few outdoor students and staff during a thirteen hour road trip from San Antonio to Fayetteville. Their thinking; we need a way to demonstrate to the current administration that students and staff use bicycle transportation as a viable form of commuting, that there is no infrastructure or policy in place (currently) to accommodate cyclists like us and that should be fixed for the benefit of students, facility, staff and the University itself.
What our plan is and why you should care: Our plan is to bring together the cycling community at the University of Arkansas to share with them education and instruction on proper riding techniques and safety. To get enough people excited to ride their bikes to school and dismiss the notion that it’s too hard or too scary to ride The Hill. With this well organized and planned movement a lot of support and attention will likely follow. For students at the University we will hold “sessions” throughout the spring semester between the library and the union. They will be promoted by free shirts (if you ride there), fun people along with education on cycling transportation itself and what you can do to help our movement. These “sessions” will culminate into a large event which will be held at the end of the spring semester. This will give us our base, our support, and our numbers but unfortunately without support from the administration nothing will get done, no trails, no infrastructure. Why should they care? Well for starters the University of Arkansas sticks out like a sore thumb to cyclists from surrounding community. Fayetteville has spent lots of money recently on the Skull Creek trail systems and has been certified as a “Bike Friendly Community” by The League of American Bicyclists. This not only encourages people to ride there bikes and be healthy but also shows that Fayetteville cares about sustainability, going green, and the local economy. The university would be smart to follow suit not only for the image of a bicycle friendly establishment or for sustainability reasons but to draw in and retain incoming freshman. More students mean more money and that’s something the Administration does care about. Alas though our goal is not to fight the administration but to join them. We will create a committee of students and staff from places all over the university including: FYE, Sustainability Council, Special Events, the Outdoor Connection Center and the Transportation Department (just to name a few). This committee will work hand in hand with the students on the ground collecting data and educating as well as communicating directly with the administration to achieve our end goal, a “Master Plan” for bicycling and pedestrians on campus. This plan if approved by the administration and passed by the student populous would require the University to accommodate cyclists and pedestrians when making any decisions on the future of our campus. Which as of right now, the administration has not addressed.
Whether you are a student, staff or facility member it should be pretty obvious that something needs to be done to accommodate bicyclists and pedestrians on campus. If on the other hand you don’t think so, next time you are outside between classes on campus please just take a look around.
